


Sweet Madness

by TeamGwenee



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1920s, Angst, F/M, First Meetings, Hurt/Comfort, Jaime deals with the aftermath of the War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:08:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24279367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeamGwenee/pseuds/TeamGwenee
Summary: Prequel to 'To Be Suitable'. A bit darker, exploring how Brienne and Jaime came to get engaged.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 13
Kudos: 99





	Sweet Madness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [slipsthrufingers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/slipsthrufingers/gifts).



> This is for slipsthrufingers as a thank you for the dramatic reading she did of the My Immortal Comment I left her. I'm so glad you liked it and it made me smile so much to hear it read back.  
> Please enjoy! :)

Brienne remembered the day she first met Jaime Lannister, as the day Arya Stark had her hair cut. 

It caused quite a hullabaloo. Before the war, the entire household, downstairs and up, had been buzzing with curiosity as to how the hoydenish younger Stark girl would handle her coming of age. 

Sansa had managed to scrape in her coming out just before the outbreak of war and as moving as the sight of the flame haired beauty descending the grand staircase of the Stark’s townhouse, dazzling in white silk and ostrich feathers, could move one to tears, it also caused many an eye to wander to young Arya. Forever in a scrape, and unlikely to run a brush through her hair, let alone endure the rigmarole of having it curled and put up as befitted a grown woman. She liked to run amok with her cousin and younger brothers, grace and decorum thrown out of the window, along with the sampler forced onto her by her beleaguered governess. 

The war had seen some maturity develop in Arya, as indeed the whole word had seemed to grow older. Half its youth had died in the bloodied soils of foreign lands after all. Despite this, Arya remained very much Arya.

Perhaps it shouldn’t have been such a surprise that Arya had bobbed her hair. She; along with the rest of the Stark ladies, had embraced the looser, more practical silhouettes of the twenties. But it was very much Sansa who was known as the fashionable member of the family, continuously pouring over Vogue and taking in orders from the House of Wydman. But it was scrappy young Arya who had embraced the boldest fashion of all. Indeed, she could have stepped off the streets of the avant-garde Riverlands. 

As it was, Sansa could not bring herself to embrace the masculine new styles and to sever the flaming locks that had won her much admiration. She twisted and curled and pinned to keep up with the fashions and to avoid looking outmoded, but she never took the scissors to her hair. For once, her role as the bang on trend sister, was supplanted. 

Lady Stark’s reaction to her youngest daughter’s bobbed hair had been resigned and practical. “At least,” she said, “Arya is more likely to keep her hair tidy.”

The usually measured and stoic Lord Stark’s reaction was considerably more aggrieved. Arya had always held a tender place in his heart, perhaps due to her uncanny resemblance to his much loved late sister, and this severe reminder she was no longer a mischievous little girl with half-undone plaits and a pinafore struck him as very painful indeed.

Baby Rickon had taken one look at his sister’s shorn head and started crying. 

Brienne’s own thoughts on the matter, surmounted to the haircut suited Arya, it was practical, and Brienne was hardly in a place to judge the appearances of others. Her own hair was rarely allowed to grow past her jaw.

Despite this, the commotion following Arya’s transformation was inescapable and was the subject of discussion at breakfast, luncheon, tea and dinner, even as guests began to arrive for the shooting party. Therefore, as trivial a detail as it seemed, Brienne would forever remember the day she met the love of her life, as the day Arya Stark got her hair bobbed. 

#

Jaime remembered the day he met one Miss Brienne Tarth, as the one day he was grateful Tyrion had announced plans to open a theatre troupe. His scamp of a younger brother had recently spent time in Harrentown and had been struck by the brutal, avant-garde art that was thriving in shell shocked city. 

The Great War had poisoned the soil of Westeros in every kingdom. But the Riverlands, centre of the kingdoms and with no mountains or seas to guard their people, had been ravaged. Jaime himself remembered all too well the abandoned villages and desecrated homes he had passed through before his hand grew putrid, the flow of rancid discharge earning him an _honourable_ discharge. 

The artists of the Riverlands had responded to the desecration of all that they had known and all that had been certain, with an art movement that before the war had been deemed too bizarre, too nonsensical to truly have any meaning. After the war, the avant-garde seemed to many the only true way in which the senseless horror that had fallen upon them could be understood. 

When the world had fallen into a nightmare, what was logical and ordered, the well made, four act play with its polite tragedies, ceased to make sense.    
  
One painting Jaime had seen, on visiting a gallery at his brother’s insistence, had rather struck Jaime. A violent clash of red and blue shapes. The brutality of it struck Jaime as a scream. A long, constant note. Piercing and unheard. 

_ (The day Tyrion announced he planned to start a theatre troupe, was also the day he was disinherited, as it happens.) _

#

Jaime had been a crack shot, once upon time. Back when tweed and flat caps was all he wore when aiming a gun, before his targets suddenly grew much larger than birds or rabbits. It seemed surreal, that after trudging through the trenches and diving for masks as the mustard gas-

they called it the yellow horses, because that’s what it looked like, a horde of horses charging, the swirls and clouds the legs rearing beneath them, and then your spit turned yellow and the demon horses rode you beneath your skin.

After that, to put on tweed and go strolling through the highlands before settling for a picnic of game pie, you had to laugh.

Jaime’s friend, Adam, had also been a crack shot. The pair had been quite the dandies in their tweed, and in their white tie and tails. And their liveries, certainly. Adam had been by Jaime’s side during the trench foot and fleas and his crippling and the corpses drowning in gas. He left with Jaime and came home with Jaime.    
  


He came  _ home _ .

And then the Dornish flu got him in a jape worthy of a Lannister.

Jaime didn’t want to hear the guns again. Even if he was wearing tweed and not a coat of his own filth. 

He had to be grateful for his hand. His hand was crippled in the field of action, he could carry his scars with pride and none would need to know that he was frightened. Frightened and tired and just didn’t want to hear the guns again.

He begged out of the first shoot because of the hand and none could question his choice. They didn’t need to know how  _ frightened _ he was. But still, there was a pity and nobody pitied a Lannister.

“Actually,” he drawled to his host, “I hear there is some little art exhibition in Wintertown. I thought I might pop my head in. My young brother is rather besotted with the whole avant-garde movement and it can do no harm trying to learn half of what he is talking about.”

#

“Lady Stark,” Brienne had asked, diffident and obliging as ever, “I was wondering, seeing as you would have little use for me on the shoot, if I may have the afternoon to visit the exhibition come to Wintertown?”

Lady Stark granted the request eagerly, thankful during this time of uneven number and excess women, to have been spared having to remind the one she has always endeavoured to treat as one of the family that she was in fact  _ not _ one of the family, and ask the humble secretary to sit out. 

#

Neither Tarth nor Lannister had intended to spend the afternoon together. Miss Tarth especially had little desire to do so, when their first introduction had resulted in Lord Jaime reacting with exaggerated shock at her height in what had been an attempt at comedy, before informing her that her serviceable knitted waistcoat was so ugly he was almost willing to have his eyeballs shot out.

And he had seen that happen, so he knew the cost.

And yet, mostly due to Lord Jaime’s belief that he could wring some entertainment from badgering the poor secretary, and the poor secretary determined not to show weakness from such a repugnant adversary, the two found themselves locked in conversation. And for two foes full of disdain for each other, they continued to seek each other out during the week that followed in order to engage once more.

The first conversation, the one in the gallery, went a little like this;

“I don’t like them. They’re ugly, and don’t mean anything.”

“I would rather have thought you would have felt rather comfortable around them. Or do the mismatched faces hit a little close to home.”

“I liked the romantics. The scenes from Bael the Bard and the maidens and the knights-”

“Yes, I liked the knights too. Bewitched by them. Until I thought fighting nobly for my country was as close as getting to being a true knight as possible. A livery suited me as well as golden armour, if not so shiny. But speaking as a man who has charged into battle, these ugly pictures that don’t mean anything will show you more of what it is to be a soldier than rippling banners and golden armour ever will.”

#

The next evening, Lord Jaime felt it necessary to comment on Miss Tarth’s attire.

“That grey dress is almost as dour as your personality Miss Tarth, although the cut suggests some degree of attention. Whatever maker made you certainly did a rush job.”

“I apologise that my appearance is so unappealing to you, Lord Jaime. Perhaps you can complain to our maker of my poor design with the rest of your complaints, along with the toughness of your meat, the calibre of your room and the draught in your bedroom.”

“I was given the coldest room and don’t you deny it. They are playing a foxtrot. I have rather a fancy to see you stumble over the dance floor. Join me for a turn.”

“I think not.”

#

It was during their third conversation that Lord Jaime conceded that he did not find Brienne wholly without interest.

“Do you like being a secretary?”

“I am content. I’m better off than most certainly.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“I count myself as fortunate.”

“You are too honest to lie, but I can see when you are trying to deflect. Is this what you want”?

“Well…”

“You don’t need to hold back from me as though I would turn whatever you revealed into a joke. I would mock you either way.”

“I spent my summer holidays staying with my Uncle Godwin, on his farm. I liked tending to the horses, and the dogs. He said I had a touch with them. I would have liked to be a vet.”

“Why don’t you then?”

“That’s not possible.”

“Why ever not. Would the Starks refuse you help?”

“They took care of me since my father’s death, and were good to give me employment as well as an education. I could not ask for more. I have to work off what they paid for my schooling before I even think of anything else.”

“These Starks are more like Lannisters than I thought.”

“What?”

“Oh, collecting their debts. Taking what is owed to them.”

“It’s not like that. They were kind to me.”

“Is it kindness if it expects repayment?”

“They do not expect repayment.”

“Then why do you stay stuck here? It’s a new world out there, everything is changing. Isn’t that what everyone says. A new world for man and woman. Even for blasted ugly women such as yourself.”

#

“Do you, do you regret going to war?”

“Regretting...it almost indicates it was avoidable. It was a choice.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“That war, it was the world stripped of its packaging. It was man laid bare, manners and masks torn to shreds to reveal the madness within. Everything, the parties and the tweed and the right order to walk out of the dining hall, is nothing. What is real is the chaos. The black, screaming pit of chaos”

“Surely that isn’t true.”   
“ I was in the bloody war. You weren’t. Keep dreaming of you ladies with flowers in their hair, and white knights on handsome steeds, and do not think to lecture me on what is real. Good night.”

#

“I was short with you yesterday. It was unworthy of me. Forgive me.”

“Forgive me, I should not have brought up the subject.”

“I am glad you did, you are the first who has done so. People think… they think it’s my hand that carries the worst scar. But it’s, but it’s my soul. Living in those trenches, screams and sobbing and the bullets raining down on you while your skin burns as its chewed by a million fleas, it rips your soul to shreds. And then when I came home it was like I was expected to have a tailor simply stitch up the tears in order to make me fit for polite society again. It has been good, not having to pretend for once.”

“I’m glad, truly. If there is anything I can do to help…”

“Dance with me.”

“I can’t.”

“I will see you tripping over your own feet before this week is out!”

“This week is nearly over, you are fighting a lost cause. I suggest you save your time and yield.”

“I lost my hand and my belief in the goodness of mankind fighting a lost cause, my time is nothing. And I can tell you truthfully that good men have died for less than the pleasure of dancing with you.”

“I will make a fool of myself. I...I am glad to make you happy but I,  _ look _ at me.”

“I am.”

“I will look ridiculous. It is as you say. I will stumble and trip over my feet and I will be lucky not to end up falling flat on my face.”

“Not when I am holding you. Dance with me.”

“Just for one turn.”

It was for more than one turn.

#

“Marry me.”

“What joke is this? We’ve known each other one week.”

“One week which has felt more real than the past year. I was walking through shadows and nightmares before I met you. I am not ready for this week to end.”

“I just, look at the two of us. You can’t pretend that the gap between us cannot be crossed.”

“It can if I stand on my toes, and I can reach high enough to kiss you. Allow me to demonstrate.”

“I was not talking of my height-”

“See. And was that not a sweet kiss?”

“We, we can’t. It would be madness.”

“The world is mad. There is nothing in this world but madness. Let it for once be a sweet madness. Let it be the madness of lovers and not the madness of generals. Let the nightmares be surpassed by dreams, and let happy endings be a truth once more. For me, Brienne, for once, let it be so. Just this once. Let it be love that wins.”


End file.
